Sing a Song of Senses
by Brightmotor
Summary: Little Einsteins are deeply strange. The characters have nothing to do with Albert Einstein and they're certainly not much smarter than I am. Anyway, the Little Einsteins get caught up in a strange plot to discover the essence of humanity and intelligenc
1. Dim Lights Glass Cube

Sing a Song of Senses

"Do you hear that?" June asked. An tinny, electronic noise emanated from deep within the cave. Rocket had picked up a strange energy waveform from within this very cave, basically a sinkhole that leveled off about a hundred feet underground. They could still faintly hear the echoing pulse of Rocket's induction fans playing ambient to the sounds of water dripping off of stalactites. A small cavern stream babbled lightly and the percussion of June and Quincy's shoes tapping set a nerve-wracking rhythm in the dark cave, their only illumination coming from Quincy's flashlight, June's brighter light having burnt out several hundred feet back.

"Yeah, what do you think it is?" Quincy asked back, feeling far more tense than June, but having the nerve to hide it better. I hope it's just them down here, thought Quincy. "They better be glad we came all the way down here," he remarked before chuckling nervously, hoping June would pick up on the sarcasm and help to release the tension pressing against the two with each step they took. June chuckled nervously as well, but it did nothing to ease the tension.

The waveform Rocket detected from the cave was almost exactly like the waveform detected at home base when Leo and Annie disappeared, with the slight differences easily being attributed to interference and signal loss from being emitted from within the cave. Whatever was emitting the waveform was nothing like anything documented ever, but the idea of an alien presence was more ridiculous than any other possibility imaginable or unimaginable. The idea of a vast, multinational conspiracy was more plausible, considering the response generated by the international scientific community when the Voyager spacecraft was discovered flying back through our solar system. This led to the discovery of a micro-black hole, the specimen posing so much gravity that it slingshot the probe at ninety times its original velocity, and putting it within Mercury's orbit around the sun. Once recovered, Voyager gave us immeasurable amounts of data regarding extra solar radiation and phenomena, ranging from parts of the EM spectrum that were completely silent outside our solar system, to near silent bursts of radiation that were completely impossible to detect in the interference generated by our sun. But nothing documented terrestrially or extraterrestrially resembled this particular pattern of wavelengths and amplitudes.

A pool of water collected about twenty feet ahead, next to what appeared to be an opening to a more spacious cavern. The tinny, electronic noise grew to a mere electrical buzz that had been modulated by the cave echoes. once inside the cavern, Quincy pointed the flashlight upwards, but the beam of light was lost to a profound darkness that extended eternally vertically.

"Hey! There's a light!" exclaimed June, pointing toward a bright green light that would have been easily overpowered by a modest amount of sunshine. Quincy shined the light toward it as June ran to see what it was. June arrived at the light first followed a few seconds by Quincy. The light was on shiny silver box, with another light next to the green one, although off, and two red switch guards. Cyrillic text had been printed all over the box, but just above each switch guard someone had scratched "FIRST THIS ONE" and "THEN THIS ONE!!!".

June looked at Quincy, and they both agreed, silently, to turn the switches on. Coming all this way, being away from Rocket this long, it seemed like the only thing to do now, as if there were no alternatives or time to consider other ideas.

June flipped up the first guard, revealing a shiny toggle switch that she then flicked up. Once flipped up, a much louder electrical buzz filled the cavern. She then flipped up the other red guard and found a similar toggle switch also in the down position. June reached for it, momentarily hesitating, but then flipping the switch up. Even before the switch locked in the up position, an enormous, thunderous CRACK filled the cavern, accompanied simultaneously by a blinding, white light. The sudden stimulus absolutely stunned the two and they fell down, eyes clenching closed and their hands covering their ears.

In a short time, the muffled ringing in their ears went away, replaced with a hissing noise, like a welding torch, and the occasional modest cracking noise. The light wasn't really that bright as their eyes adjusted to the new illumination coming from the very top of a very tall cavern, at least 150 feet in height. Around the perimeter of the cavern there was a metal catwalk with boxes and crates of varying size and color lining the cavern wall. In the center of the cavern was what looked like a glass cube with twelve foot sides but inside the cube was infinite darkness.

"That's it," Quincy said.

"Yeah," June agreed.

The cube was what was generating the mysterious waveform. Annie and Leo were in the cube. June and Quincy both knew instantly who was responsible for this, but were too shocked to say out loud, or even think it too loudly.

"Do you think we can get in? Or can they get out? Or..." June drifted off as she stared deeper and deeper into the contradictory darkness in a glass cube in a lit room.


	2. Crazy Dreamy

June poked at buttons and flipped switches and knobs on the far panel but the unmarked or illegible stack of gauges before her did nothing. Any indication of change would have been magical, to say the least. Sometimes, the light at the top of the cavern would flicker ever so slightly and June would freeze right up, holding absolutely still in the slight hope that what she had done was going to open up that glass cube. A long second later, she would resume testing the panel with a little less hope in her heart.

As the motions of pressing and turning became more and more mechanical, June's mind drifted to Quincy, wondering what he was doing with the glass cube, and Leo and Annie, wondering what they were doing or maybe where they were.

Then a very peculiar thought crossed her mind. 'How did I get here?' Not in the cavern but at the console she was at. She remembered being next to the glass cube with Quincy, but a chunk of time was missing from the cube to the console. The more she thought about it, the more she had been missing things. She remembered climbing aboard Rocket but not the flight to the mouth of the cave. "I think I'm losing it," June said, rubbing her sore eyes.

"What was that?" Quincy asked, now right in front of June. So was the glass cube. The console she was at was now twenty feet away, next to a stack of blue crates by the cavern wall.

Her sudden movement without her awareness was a new and unwelcome shock. "I think this cube is messing with our heads," she replied.

Quincy faced away while maintaining eye contact, pointed awkwardly to his temple, and said, "No, I think... It's yooooooooooooooooooooou-"

June slowly stepped backward away from Quincy, but where her foot fell, there was no ground. She tumbled backward into an abyss that had not been there previously, another unwelcome surprise.

* * *

June gasped herself awake, staring at the ceiling in the dark room and clutching the sheets tightly with both hands. The sensation of falling was fading quickly but was still very unnerving. A brief moment in the silence passed, then she released the sheets and the breath she had been holding for that brief moment. "It was a dream," she commented to herself as she moved to the side of the bed. She peeked over the edge and down into the bottom bunk, but it was empty.

So Annie and Leo were still missing, except now June had no idea where they were.

She rolled back over to face the other side of the room, only to see a figure slightly illuminated by the moon. June froze up again, but didn't scream in alarm; this figure was a familiar one. The figure stepped closer to the bed and just as June had suspected, it was Leo. "I thought you were still missing," she said to him.

Leo shrugged and said, "I am."

"How can you be missing if you're right here?"

Leo snapped his fingers and chuckled, "I'm not really here. Maybe I'm in your head, maybe it's something far stranger. But, I can help you."

June sat up in her bed. "If you're in my head, how can you help me? You're just proving that I'm crazy."

Leo sat in a chair near the bed. "Welp, I guess you're crazy then. In any case, we're still tired, so you should get some sleep. It is 2 in the morning, after all."

"I guess I'll worry about this in the morning," June yawned. She mumbled, "Going crazy, stupid Leo making me crazy I'm going to kill him when we find...zzz"

Leo closed his eyes and fell asleep in the chair beside the bed. No dreams came to June for the rest of the night.


End file.
